On any given day when I was 18 years old, the odds were pretty good that you could find me doing one of three things: Sleeping, watching baseball and, of course, eating at Taco Bell.
What I wasn't doing was crafting mature folk songs and playing shows all over England in support of a highly acclaimed debut album.
That's what English songbird Laura Marling has been doing since she was 17 years old, simultaneously succeeding in putting out a remarkably mature collection of folk numbers on her debut album "Alas I Cannot Swim," and putting my baseball-watching, taco-swilling eighteen-year-old self to shame.
Marling, who celebrated her 18th birthday in February, has been a rising star on the English music scene since she started playing for an audience when she was just 16, attracting all sorts of attention from fans and established stars alike, including Devendra Banhart, English indie rocker Jamie T, and Noah and the Whale front man Charlie Fink, who produced Marling's debut.
The songs on "Alas I Cannot Swim" are, in a word, sublime. Marling's ability to marry infectious folk melodies with charming and mature lyrics is, quite frankly, without comparison among her musical peers - which if you consider the company at her age, is not very surprising.
The Jonas Brothers, while undeniably dreamy, are more novelty than serious musical act, though they do have Marling beat in the fame department.Folk music has never been about widespread stardom, though.
It's about evoking emotion through a kind of musical poetry unique to the genre, something that Marling achieves with gusto on her debut.
Songs such as "Ghosts" and "Old Stone" paint beautiful pictures of jaded lovers, while "You're no God" is as brilliantly defiant as anything by Cat Power or Joni Mitchell.
Marling's compositions range from the fantastically melancholy ("My Manic and I") to the deceptively whimsical ("Failure"), giving the listener a nice broad range of different types of songs to work with.
The "Cross Your Fingers/Crawled Out of the Sea" medley is one of the highlights of the album and has its foundation built around a marriage of melody and lyrics, giving it a sarcastic kind of peppiness that begs for multiple listens.
Marling's superb vocal range is on full display on the latter half of this brilliant medley, where an all-male vocal choir plays the perfect compliment to her powerfully feminine vibrato. It may only last for 1:16 minutes, but it is an undeniably brilliant moment on the album.
Marling is at her most expressive on "Tap at My Window," a stunningly beautiful song about the follies of a Romeo-and-Juliet-style courtship. Marling sounds like an angel as she croons about unrequited love and family turmoil.
Support from a string quartet adds a beautiful dimension to this song, cementing it as one of the premier tracks on the album.
Perhaps the most arresting song on the album is "Your Only Doll," an epic seven-minute medley that serves as the perfect bookend for the album. Marling's maturity shines through on this one, where heartfelt lyrics about feminine identity and sexual possessiveness are well beyond her years in terms of maturity and thoughtfulness.
The sound of birds chirping in the wild serves as an interlude for the medley, which then fades into a hidden track that serves as the namesake of the album, ending things with more of the same sarcastic peppiness found on "Cross Your Fingers."
2008 has seen some impressive debuts (Vampire Weekend comes to mind), and Marling's certainly ranks among the best so far. Look for the Brit native to make a big splash on the folk scene this year, where she is sure to be a stalwart for some time.
Grade: A
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